Coffee drive-through not in keeping with neighborhood or city

“Protecting our air with a bold commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions…” “Reducing dependence on driving alone…” This is language from Denver’s newly approved plans to guide growth and development.

A drive-through coffee restaurant at the northwest corner of Montview and Central Park Blvds. is nearing city approval and construction is expected to start in the next two months. It will likely be a market success, attracting fleets of Stapleton SUVs along with sedans and pick-up trucks from the larger neighborhood. Their drivers will idle their vehicles spewing polluting emissions while they peck away at their cell phones oblivious to the walkers, bicyclists and school children trying to navigate multiple through lanes, free-right turn lanes, and multiple traffic signal cycles not to mention the drive-through lane itself.

Focused as it is on serving cars, the building turns its back to the surrounding neighborhood. It makes a mockery of Denver’s vaunted city-wide planning efforts and the “Green Book,” Stapleton’s visionary master plan. For the people living in Stapleton and East Colfax, what could have been a neighborhood coffee shop becomes yet one more strip center designed for cars at the expense of people.

Nothing in the recently approved city plans suggest that drive-through uses are to be encouraged in residential areas. While the use will no doubt be a commercial success, sometimes we have to save ourselves from our worst instincts. That’s why we adopt bold, visionary planning documents—to steer us in a different, healthier direction. Fortunately, there’s a clear-cut solution to this particular problem: allow a coffee shop, reject the drive-through. Let’s walk, not just talk.

—John Fernandez

The Rename Stapleton group is back at it again

Once again, in spite of multiple rejections by the residents of the community of their efforts to rename our community, the Rename Stapleton group is back at it again. – insisting that the residents of Stapleton bend to their will. In that effort they have decided to portray Stapleton residents as wealthy white racists who intentionally try to keep Blacks from moving into Stapleton. On their website they misrepresent all of us through statements including:

1. The “neighborhood is exclusive to higher income levels”- I am sure this will come as a surprise to all the families living in income qualified housing and those who are middle class.
2. Stapleton “feels like a gated community” – they aren’t referring to physical gates but to attitudes and actions that tell Blacks they aren’t welcome in Stapleton
3. A video renaming Stapleton as KKKpleton – mocking everyone who lives in Stapleton as supporters of the Ku Klux Klan

Rather than tell the full story about Ben Stapleton and trusting the residents of Stapleton to make informed decisions, they only present the part of the story that meets their agenda –that Stapleton was a member of the klan. They leave out that he resigned from the klan, fired the chief of police and other klans men in the police force, and in turn was denounced by the klan. To his credit, Stapleton was the driving force in establishing the airport (making Denver the center for air travel in the Rocky Mountain region), while also building Red Rocks amphitheater and promoting an extensive network of parks throughout the city.

I trust the residents of Stapleton to make the right decision once they have all the facts, not a one sided smear campaign

—Bert Singleton